Currently, battery life limitations pose a significant challenge for mobile terminals, such as “smart phones.” Users of mobile smart phone users may be disappointed that the power charge in their phones' batteries may be depleted after periods as short as less than a day. Some studies indicate that standby time uses a significant portion of daily phone battery usage. A phone in its standby mode “wakes up” (e.g., activates, or assumes an active state after reposing in an otherwise relatively inactive, dormant or “sleeping” state) quite frequently in response to wakeup events that occur from various applications, such as “Gmail™,” “Pulse™,” “Facebook™” and the like. Typically, the more communications related applications are installed on a phone, the more wakeup events occur and thus, the more frequently the phone wakes up. Although a phone's display screen is off during standby time, the overall power consumption of the phone in standby mode may still be significantly increased by its frequent wakeup. An unawakened phone in standby mode may generally consume about 10 Milliwatts (mW) of power. However, power consumption may rise by an order of magnitude or more to reach 170 mW of a phone that is awakened in the standby mode.
A conventional approach to reducing power consumption in a mobile device is directed to turning off (e.g., deactivating) as many power expensive applications as possible. Further, applications such as “Easy Power Saver,” “Juice Saver” and the like exist, which are designed to conserve power of a mobile terminal's daily usage. Such power saving applications typically enable and disable a phone's communication or interconnectivity features such as Wireless Fidelity (WIFI) wireless local area network (wLAN) or Third or Fourth Generation, etc. (3G or 4G, etc.) and/or adjust its backlight brightness level by changing some of the phone's control components based on pre-defined rules and time. However, disabling WIFI or 3G, etc. may affect user experience with the mobile terminal adversely.
Therefore, a method for saving power in a mobile terminal would be useful, which does not affect adversely a user's experience therewith.